Here are 3 simple thinking techniques I tend to use each day. There are some more advanced thinking techniques, but here I’m boiling down to a set of 3 you can use today. In fact, you can even use them while you read this post.

What are the key stages in an innovation life cycle? What is the end-to-end value chain for bringing innovation to market? In “Smart Spenders, the Global Innovation 1000,” an article in strategy+business magazine, Barry Jaruzelski, Kevin Dehoff, and Rakesh Bordia write about the four key stages of innovation that the 94 high-leverage innovators have in common.

I’m a fan of learning from the best. What are the high-leverage strategies that the leaders in innovation use? In “Smart Spenders, the Global Innovation 1000,” an article in strategy+business magazine, Barry Jaruzelski, Kevin Dehoff, and Rakesh Bordia write about the successful strategies that the 94 high-leverage innovators use.

What is your business?  What will it be?  What should it be? In The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management, Peter F. Drucker writes about asking what your business is, will be, and should be to avoid spending your energy defending yesterday and instead, spend your energy exploiting today and the future.
Key Take AwaysHere’s my key take aways:

Ask what your business should be.
Systematically abandon what no longer adds value.
Don’t waste energy defending yesterday.
Exploit today and tomorrow through systematic analysis.
Systematically analyze existing products, …

What leads to the downfall of established companies?  In The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management, Peter F. Drucker writes about five bad Entrepreneurial habits that let small companies leapfrog over the big companies.
The Five Bad Entrepreneurial Habits
According to Drucker, the five bad habits are:

NIH (Not Invented Here)
“Cream” a market.
The belief in “quality.”
The illusion of the “premium” price.
Maximize rather than optimize.

The Downfall of Established Companies
Drucker writes how the bad habits let small companies use Entrepreneurial judo:
There are in particular five fairly common …

According to Michael E. Gerber, Innovation, Quantification, and Orchestration are the backbone of every extraordinary business.  They are the essence of your Business Development process.   In The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, Gerber explains how Innovation, Quantification, and Orchestration are key to your business development process.
Key Take AwaysHere’s my key take aways:

Innovation, Quantification and Orchestration are the keys to your business.  Innovation, Quantification and Orchestration are the backbone of business development.
Innovate in how you do things.  Innovate in how your business …

Innovation objectives are how you realize the potential for your business.  Innovation is how you can create game changers either in the marketplace, your product, or your processes.  In The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management, Peter Drucker writes about innovation objectives.
Key Take AwaysHere’s my key take aways:

You can innovate in your product, process or marketplace.  There’s three kinds of innovation: product, process, and marketplace.
Innovation is how you grow your business.  Innovation is how you transform your business into what it should …

How do you create predictable results in your business? Once you’ve figured out that an innovation is useful and you’ve quantified its impact, how do you implement it in your system? You orchestrate it. Orchestration is the elimination of discretion to help produce predictable results. Orchestration is about creating order, standardization, and quality in a predictable way. In The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, Michael E. Gerber writes about Orchestration.
Discretion is the Enemy of Order, Standardization and Quality
Gerber writes how Orchestration …

How do you know whether your innovations are working? You need to quantify your results. This is how take a business from good to great. You experiment, you innovate, and you measure your results. You carry forward what works and you throw out what doesn’t. If you don’t have the numbers, you’re flying blind. In The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, Michael E. Gerber writes about the need for quantifying your results.
Key Take AwaysHere’s my key take aways:

Know your numbers. Start …

Which innovations can amplify your impact or save you time or create more value? Innovations in your approach. It’s one thing to try to innovate in your products. It’s another to innovate your process. Innovating in your process can unleash your capability, create more value, reduce costs, … etc. To get in the right mindset, you have to think of your business as a product. It doesn’t matter whether you’re working from home or working in a large corporation, your system of results is an opportunity for innovation. In The …

Can setting a quota, help you accomplish more? It worked for Thomas Edison. In Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques (2nd Edition), Michael Michalko writes about how Edison used quotas to improve his results.
Thomas Edison’s Personal Invention Quotas
Michalko writes:
“Thomas Edison held 1,093 patents. He was a great believer in exercising his mind and the minds of his workers and felt that without a quota he probably wouldn’t have achieved very much. His personal invention quote was a minor invention every ten days and a major invention every six months. To …

Storyboarding is a brainstorming technique where you stick pictures on a wall to frame out stories. In the book, Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques (2nd Edition), Michael Michalko writes about how Walt Disney originally came up with the idea of storyboarding to see at a glance how far along a project was.
What Is Storyboarding
Michalko writes:
“Storyboarding can be likened to taking your thoughts and the thoughts of others and making them visible by spreading them on a wall as you work on your problems.”
The Story of Storyboarding
Michalko writes:
“Walt Disney came …